Well since I’ve been mostly in customer service jobs I’d like for people to know that the reps don’t make the rules or decisions. When there is something about a store or service that’s undesirable such as prices then it’s something to bring up to upper management or just let them lose you as a customer. But you can be as nice to the reps as they are to you.
Yes, my job is so easy a monkey could do it.
Why do you think I’m doing it?
Caeser? Is that you?
Electrical engineer. You can’t develop and ship an iPhone in a year. Apple has multiple generations under development at the same time.
Woa. OK
This is makes sense, and is also how iOS can be so optimized for the hardware.
They lock down the hardware of the phone way early, giving them a lot of time to port/update the software and polish it like crazy.
I mean, they also have to figure out how to manufacture like 240 MILLION phones or roughly 1 every 130milliseconds.
The design is likely locked in around a year in advance, and the remainder of the year is spinning up production and actually manufacturing the phones.
The things I ask you to do while troubleshooting aren’t guesses. They’re based on years of experience.
Sometimes I’m guessing, but my guesses are more informed than yours and I’m only suggesting giving it a try because it will be faster than this argument we’re now having about it.
If you can frame every guess so that it can only ever have a binary A/B answer, troubleshooting and guessing are pretty much identical.
If you work around forklifts, never trust the driver. Ideally they’re being safe and watching out for you, but don’t gamble on it. They’re heavier than a car and can very easily kill you or at the least break your foot and it will be an arduous healing process.
Ideally they’re being safe and watching out for you, but don’t gamble on it
Also, accidents just happen - people have heart attacks, strokes, seizures, machines malfunction, all sorts of shit can suddenly happen that is out of anyone’s control, so even if someone is being safe and watching out for you, it isn’t worth the gamble…
Never walk behind a forklift
Never get near one unless you’re getting in it to use it.
Icing a cake takes time, especially when it’s one meant to feed between 90 and 100 people. We’re not trying to ruin your kids birthday when we need 24 hours notice for something that size, it’s that someone needs to take at least 2 hours to get it done, and we can’t magically make that happen on short notice and full days.
Ha, it’s your cake day today…
At least try rebooting your computer before you contact I.T. It really does fix a lot of things. And don’t lie to us and say you already tried it once we get to your office.
$ uptime 326 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, 12 secondsYep, buddy. You sure did reboot like I asked.
Who would want to lose an uptime streak like that?!
That’s a pretty weak uptime counter. I have had some kit go half a decade with no reboot.
Damn son, what are they running?
Datacenter routers and switches.
I’m an engineer. When you see something really badly designed and think “wow, those engineers are so stupid! I could have done a better job myself!”
Please know that we did think about it. It’s just that some guy with an MBA decides the schedule, and another guy with an MBA decides the budget, and terrible designs get released no matter how much we protest. I’m sorry we couldn’t figure it out fast enough and cheap enough, though.
And yes, we do mistakes all the time too. It’s just that we usually know about the obvious ones.
As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.
I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.
The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.
Excellent point about government sponsored anti corruption measures, too. Here in the US our government contracts award “points” to businesses which are minority or woman- owned.
In practice, the same construction companies simply institute shell companies, and make their wives/daughters/sisters the owners of these shell companies, charge a premium, and have the “owner” subcontract the work back to the same old company, effectively making themselves an extra 20 percent…
Small businesses (which may be minority or woman owned, but they don’t play golf with the government buyers) are still totally forgotten.
Every system will get gamed by bad actors.
At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.
For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.
The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.
No good solution, really.
Or the engineers have been given bad requirements and made the wrong product.
Yes, another tragedy is when sales guy from company A talks to sales guy from company B.
You want a submarine to also fly into space? Oh yeah, we can do that! Our engineers are really smart, shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll have that design over to you in 2 weeks!
Later, when talking to the engineering team…
Well, I don’t see what’s so hard about it. We’ve had submarines and planes in WW2, you’re telling me we can’t innovative and combine those ideas? Well, this is an opportunity for you guys to really show off the engineering ability of the company… And I can’t move the promise date now, I already talked to him on the phone and I’m about to go on my cruise. Call me if you need anything!
Another guy with an MBA:It needs to have AI too!!! You know, like ChaTGPT. So it can reason about the world!!
Engineer: You know ChatGPT can’t “reason” right?
MBA Guy: But I can tell it to autogenerate code!
Engineer: It’s just finding code snippets like you could find with a search engine.
MBA: But they said it was sentient! AI!! LLMS!! SYNERGY!!
Engineer:…Nevermind. Yes, we’ll build a submarine that can fly and add a chat box so you can ask it what it is thinking.
Engineer quits next day
I’m half joking, but it pains me as an engineer to admit how close to reality this can be.
GET. THIS. GUY. HIS. VOTES.
Edit: The budget slayers, almost wanna punch them in the face and walk out of the office for good.
I work food service and I never eat at restaurants.
The amount of grease pumped into a personal pan pizza where i once worked…
Go on…
That’s something about you, not your job. You’d need to specify why you don’t in order for the comment to be about the job.
You’re right.
Were the maggots already there or did they come as an added bonus with the jizz?
If you can look people in the eye and make them laugh, while also maintaining relationships long term: You will likely make the most money and have the best life in sales, regardless of industry.
Career Linux/Unix guy since the early 2000s with a high school diploma here. If you love tech, can wear a button-up shirt, and chew with your mouth closed, you can go into tech sales. Where you can make 2 to 10x the money while traveling the world and get to do just as much or more cool tech stuff than you do today.
I used to pull cables and rack servers while getting paid shit and working stupid late hours. For the last 10+ years I’ve done some of the best tech work of my career while eating Nobu and never paying for a hotel or flight when I go on vacation.
And don’t say some BS like that only worked for people that got into tech early. I’ve been the tech screener for applicants for years. We hire plenty of people from Gen z to boomers. We’ve had $200k+ jobs sit empty for over a year.
As a welder, quality doesn’t come cheap or fast. A lot of work goes into my work. Even if all I’m doing is welding Part A to Part B, a lot of research, prep, and planning goes into it.
I need to know what the base material is, the base metal thickness, I need to clean the HAZ, I need to protect everything near the HAZ. I need to actually weld it and clean it for repaint.
A good welder plans to have their welds last the lifespan of the thing being welded on. If I’m welding a car frame together, I’m going to make damn sure they’re good long-lasting welds that resist corrosion. Those welds will outlive the car itself.
You can bring your phone into the X-ray room. Unless you’re getting a hip X-ray you can even keep it in your pocket. Keys and wallet too!
All my patients are convinced that a phone can’t be in the pocket and I cannot even convince them otherwise. They don’t believe me!
I feel like that comes down to misconceptions over X-ray vs. MRI. Because you absolutely CANNOT have any metal on you for an MRI.
Second this.
Well, technically you can, but it’s not going to be fun…
If your router or switch costs less your computer, I can’t help you.
If your computer costs less than your car, I can’t help you either.My router was free with my fibre connection and it’s worked perfectly for three years along with the free TV streaming box
My car cost 12k brand new cos it’s a little shitbox and that’s all I need
My pc was about 3k and I built it myself
I’m guessing here, but it sounds like you’re an pretentious dick and I wouldn’t ask for advice anyway
Things running in a datacenter might not be quite analogous to consumer equipment.
Is how I would interpret their comment.
I think the point he’s trying to make is that he works on specialized network gear for enterprises and really isn’t the right person to go for IT support for your home internet issue. Not that you’re beneath him.
I kinda understand too, I have spent a lot of time in highly specialized technical domains and people often then ask me for tech support for things like their printer or whatnot that I am ignorant of.
Bingo
He’s saying he works on enterprise gear. It’s different. In networking, a lot of similar but other than rebooting shit, there isnt much to do.
And managing servers, services, using terraform or Jenkins, docker, podman, kubernetes or any other enterprise tool isn’t the same as fixing your computer not printing.
Totally different skills
I’ve seen a ton of response across lemmy like this. People are just primed to get hostile/argumentative for no reason and, as in this case, because they completely failed to comprehend the original post.
Maybe because the original post seems awfully arrogant, if you don’t know the context - and the post didn’t provide any context.
I’ve seen a ton of responses like yours. You’re implying that everyone gets the context, if they don’t, you assume everything is “hostile” if it’s not the exact line of thought you happen to support.
Accept that other people live different lives from yours and have different experiences and knowledge.
Wtf are you talking about?
Ah ha! My $100 car, $120 PC and $150 router have a new support guy!
Though really, those PCs must be either very special purpose or very general purpose.
I mean, you can hit 10/15K on a single server spec out really really easy
If you need to build out a whole rack, you can easily top 60-70k+
And that’s not even factoring fancy dancy AI hardware either lmao
You should see the prices hospitals pay. Talking like 10k for a 24 port poe switch.
10/15k is a really cheap server in my book.
Are you THE cloud?
That’s Mr Cloud to us!
I’m no longer on helpdesk duty, luckily. However, one thing I’ve learned is that people are lazy and will lie. Constantly. Even if they’re being nice. Even if they know what they’re talking about.
You say you’ve rebooted your modem. I want to believe you, I really do, but I need to make sure you actually rebooted your modem. At first, I believed people, only to find out half an hour later that the modem has an uptime of three years and the post-reboot reconnect I’ve been looking for in the logs never took place.
You say you’ve just changed your password and still can’t log in. I want to believe you, but resetting the password again takes 30 seconds and troubleshooting a lazy lie takes 10 minutes.
And for the love of god, don’t pretend to check if you’ve plugged everything in correctly when it takes exactly as long as actually checking. When I say “we should check the cabling” that’s not an insult of your intelligence, that’s a step towards resolving the problem you’ve been having for weeks.
I know repeating troubleshooting steps you’ve already done is a massive pain. I hate it just as much as you do. But sometimes, after telling me what you’ve figured out yourself, you just need to let go and do what I say if you want your problem resolved. I know the stuff I suggest doesn’t always make sense, but the shit we’re selling you doesn’t make sense if you look beyond the surface. And yes, I’m just as frustrated about the idiotic workarounds necessary to make anything work, neither one of us has the power to actually change this.
Also, don’t try this “I know the manager/boss/CEO” bullshit. Even if you’re telling the truth, nobody really cares. It’s not the flex you may think it is. Oh, and threatening legal action only slows down resolving your problem, because now someone senior needs to evaluate if you’re actually going through with a lawsuit, and every procedure needs to be double-checked to make sure you won’t win.
Lastly: when I link you something, and you call me because you “don’t understand”, I’m going to go through the steps I linked you step-by-step, directly quoting the text provided. If I’m being paid by the hour, I don’t mind that much, but you could save both of us a lot of time by at least trying to follow the manual.
When you buy a research paper, the author doesn’t get any cut from it. The journals are scams, and should be destroyed. Until that happens, try searching on arxiv.org first, usually there are preprints available there. If not, contact the authors. Most of us are happy to share our results. Your local library can also help you get access to those.
These are the more legitimate ways, and then there’s sci-hub. I’ve actually seen internationally renowned researchers open a paper using sci-hub on their laptop lol.
